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Over the past twenty years, schools across the U.S. have increasingly adopted exclusive punishment practices and criminal-justice oriented security regimes, despite historically low rates of school crime. It is now common in public middle and high schools to find full-time police officers, surveillance cameras, random searches with drug-sniffing police dogs, and zero tolerance policies. These practices are used in schools across social strata, yet racial/ethnic minority and low-income youth are more likely to be subjected to them, and far more likely than other youth to suffer negative consequences as a result. Moreover, emerging research illustrates that this increasingly punitive regime has broad and long-term consequences for youth; it impacts their entire families, alienates youth from school, and can even stifle their level of participation in community and political affairs years later. In this presentation I describe contemporary U.S. schools’ security and punishment policies and practices, how these practices operate across social strata, and what consequences they have on children.